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Is accessibility for the visually impaired a cult? How could Google even work if content could not be seperated from its visual presention?

layer8 3y ago
Layout tables were never a serious problem for screen readers, this has always been overblown. Screen readers adopted working heuristics to distinguish between layout and data tables early on, because tables were used for layout almost from the beginning (as soon as it was possible to remove the visible borders). See for example WebAIM https://webaim.org/techniques/tables/ https://webaim.org/techniques/tables/: “It is sometimes suggested, even by some accessibility advocates, that layout tables are bad for accessibility. In reality, layout tables do not pose inherent accessibility issues.”
- bazoom42 3y ago
  The heuristics described still depend on semantic html e.g the use of <th> or <caption> to signal a data table.
TeMPOraL 3y ago
> How could Google even work if content could not be seperated from its visual presention? Approximately. Like it did and does. The simplest way is to just strip the markup (or, for purposes of indexing, just ignore any token that resembles a HTML tag). That'll easily get you 90% there. You'll lose important information that's tied to form, but that's a consequence of operating in plaintext land. If doing this to build an index of the web, you'll have problem with scoundrels stuffing irrelevant text made invisible to humans by markup/CSS/JS, but that's exactly the problem Google used to have for a long time, and the essence of what SEO is :).
- bazoom42 3y ago
  How would you crawl the web in the first place if there was no way to recognize a link in the HTML?
zaphar 3y ago
Google never had a problem working with content that was blended with it's visual presentation. They literally doesn't care. They crawl anything even pdf and other non-html content. The semantic web was born from a belief that it would enable a peer to peer web that never materialized. Accessibility was better solved by aria annotations a long time ago and the semantic web was never going to properly solve it.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  FWIW, it's hard for a peer to peer web to materialize, where the web is almost entirely built and funded by entities who very much don't want a peer to peer web, and in fact actively fight it.

layer8 3y ago

Layout tables were never a serious problem for screen readers, this has always been overblown. Screen readers adopted working heuristics to distinguish between layout and data tables early on, because tables were used for layout almost from the beginning (as soon as it was possible to remove the visible borders). See for example WebAIM https://webaim.org/techniques/tables/ https://webaim.org/techniques/tables/: “It is sometimes suggested, even by some accessibility advocates, that layout tables are bad for accessibility. In reality, layout tables do not pose inherent accessibility issues.”

bazoom42 3y ago
The heuristics described still depend on semantic html e.g the use of <th> or <caption> to signal a data table.

TeMPOraL 3y ago

> How could Google even work if content could not be seperated from its visual presention? Approximately. Like it did and does. The simplest way is to just strip the markup (or, for purposes of indexing, just ignore any token that resembles a HTML tag). That'll easily get you 90% there. You'll lose important information that's tied to form, but that's a consequence of operating in plaintext land. If doing this to build an index of the web, you'll have problem with scoundrels stuffing irrelevant text made invisible to humans by markup/CSS/JS, but that's exactly the problem Google used to have for a long time, and the essence of what SEO is :).

bazoom42 3y ago
How would you crawl the web in the first place if there was no way to recognize a link in the HTML?

zaphar 3y ago

Google never had a problem working with content that was blended with it's visual presentation. They literally doesn't care. They crawl anything even pdf and other non-html content. The semantic web was born from a belief that it would enable a peer to peer web that never materialized. Accessibility was better solved by aria annotations a long time ago and the semantic web was never going to properly solve it.

TeMPOraL 3y ago
FWIW, it's hard for a peer to peer web to materialize, where the web is almost entirely built and funded by entities who very much don't want a peer to peer web, and in fact actively fight it.